by Chris Hatton
Posted on January 27, 2020 at 12:30 PM
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a term that is thrown around a lot, but do you really know what it means? It's probably not exactly what you think. Discover what practical steps you can take and how to align results directly with your business goals.
First let’s start with the textbook definition of SEO:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
To qualify this definition, we mean actions you can take to increase traffic to your recruitment website that does not involve spending money on advertising. Advertising is a very short-lived and expensive method of increasing quality traffic and is better described as digital marketing. We also want to avoid tricking people that aren’t really interested in paying for your service to click into your website i.e. low-quality traffic.
Notice that I've not mentioned anything about coming first on Google or any other search engines, or about ensuring 1000's of people visit your website each week. These metrics aren’t the complete picture, and don’t serve as a good benchmark to gauge success of any SEO investment in your time or money. As you will be aware the recruitment agency market is quite competitive so you will want to know you are getting the best results for your time and money.
Before we talk about again about increasing quantity and quality of traffic to your website let talk about how Google decides if a webpage ranks highly when a potential client or candidate does a search. No one knows exactly how Google works, and no one can every guarantee that they can get you a number one spot and certainly not that they can keep you there. These are highly guarded secrets of Google and if everyone knew then everyone would just try play the system as was done in the early days of Google. We can however infer some of the hundreds of rules that Google uses based on SEO research and testing, and also thinking about Google's overriding aim to provide relevant and high-quality search results for terms entered by a user.
The most important action you need to take for SEO is to create relevant, high-quality content that satisfy what potential candidates and clients might be searching for. I can’t stress this enough: if you want to be found then you need to create content that people are looking for. Become that expert resource to answer questions about your potential client’s and candidate’s questions. Here are some basics steps you can take:
Write down some search terms that you think your potential clients and candidates might search for. Think about if it is location, job or service driven terms e.g.
You might want to consider using some free tools to help Keyword Planner or Google Trends
The next step is to create articles, blogs, pages, etc… to add to your website that fulfils these search requests. Keywords and phrases are all important in your articles that help search engines decide if pages are relevant to a person’s search terms. Here are a few tips:
Less important these days be still a major factor is getting backlinks. What do we mean by this? It’s getting people to create links to your website. This tells Google that you must be a good source of information if people want to link to you. Here are a few things you can do:
For this you are going to need the help of an expert web developer such as Koodle Software. We help you create website that Google and other search engines can easily use. These are not things that you will necessarily be able to control such as:
It’s all well and good spending time and money on SEO, but you need to know that it is working or not working. Firstly, nothing you do for SEO is going to show results overnight. Think about 4 - 6-month review periods. Compare your key metrics to see how they are trending. There are many ways to measure but here are a few:
You may have heard of this before but Google Analytics can help you with these metrics. Speak to your web developer or Koodle Software about how to get on board with this.
The decision about how you proceed with your SEO efforts start with what your business goals are. Its not possible to target all search terms nor is it possible to engage with all social media channels or have every website on the web link to you. You must decide what your priorities are and structure your efforts to achieve those goals e.g. if your priority is to onboard more NHS clients from the north east of England then you must create content and have a presence online where your potential clients are.
My last piece of advice is that there are rarely any shortcuts to good SEO. You and your staff are the experts in your business and are in the best position to create the best results. Generically written articles, high volume, low quality directory submissions, and the multitude tricks that bad SEO companies will try sell you don’t work in todays evolved world of search.
Give us a call at Koodle if you want some more advice. Im sure we will be able to guide you in the right direction.
